The Clarinet and Clarinet Playing

INDEX

Introduction

I wrote this book because of my great concern that information about the clarinet should be more widely available. Also, I have long felt that the clarinet and clarinet playing should be better understood on all levels—not merely at the beginning and intermediate levels. Too many advanced clarinetists and clarinet teachers have been holding out on the rest of us, guarding trade secrets to an alarming degree, or at least withholding them through neglect. Interestingly, perhaps one of the most closely guarded trade secrets of all is the fact that the more advanced a player becomes, the more he or she must rely on the basic and fundamental principles that are, or should be, taught to beginners. Beginners are urged to use more air, to develop a better embouchure, to relax the arms and fingers, and so on—the very advice that should be given to the professional clarinetist when faced with a particularly difficult passage.

Another concern that led to this book is my belief that many myths about clarinet playing should be struck down. I have attempted not only to do this, but also to replace the myths with constructive alternatives. Nowhere, for instance, have I seen any full discussion of the possibility of adopting a truly workable technique for the double and triple tonguing that would seem natural on the clarinet. The type of multiple tonguing used by brass and flute players who have no mouthpiece or reed in their mouths is not adequate on clarinet in the long run. I have provided an alternative technique in Chapter 7, Tonguing and Articulation. All tonguing strokes on the clarinet—whether single, double, or triple—must be done on the reed itself.

Similarly, despite the increasing cost and decreasing strengths of commercially made clarinet reeds, nowhere have I discovered a recent, fully adequate description of the making of reeds by hand. Some earlier, and valuable, work was done in reed making by the clarinetist Kalmen Opperman and others, but I believe that I have devised a more direct, less complicated method for making reeds than any I have read about elsewhere.

The tone qualities of American clarinetists in particular are, I feel, becoming smaller and harsher through a combination of several factors; I have attempted to alleviate this problem by offering a variety of possible causes and solutions.

I believe that there is today a need to revolutionize, if possible, the common conception of what it means to practice the clarinet. I have seen too many clarinet students—and professionals, as well—almost beating their heads against the practice room walls, and I cannot let this pass without comment and without offering, again, a constructive solution. I feel that both students and teachers should approach the clarinet with a sense of humor because, otherwise, both learning and instructing become emotionally and physically overwhelming.

In the private-lesson situation, the tyrant-teacher and the victim-student are still too often the only actors in an all-too-dramatic tragedy. In Chapter 10, Teaching Other Clarinetists, I have offered an alternative approach to the private-lesson session—one that will, I hope, show the way in which teaching and learning can become pleasant give-and-take processes.

Books have been written already, of course, about the history—or life story, as I have called it—and the literature of the clarinet. Several of these are excellent. Too often, however, such books have been so packed with detail that the reader has great difficulty (to use a well-worn phrase) in seeing the forest for the trees. In Chapters 14 and 15, on the life story and the literature of the clarinet, I have provided the reader-student with a more usable source of this information.

I have become concerned that clarinetists are in general far too close-minded about everything related to music and specifically to the clarinet. In this book I hope to open some of those minds—to free them to experiment more broadly in the clarinet’s problem areas. Above all, I have felt a need for clarinetists to reorder their priorities as both musicians and clarinetists. Such a reordering will be of tremendous help to them, and might indeed revolutionize clarinet teaching.

CHAPTER

1

What a Clarinetist Needs

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND OUTLOOK

Maybe the best way to answer the question of what a serious clarinetist needs is to approach it from another angle: Why does anybody want to play clarinet in the first place? Why play an instrument at all, and why the clarinet in particular? Although these questions may seem largely rhetorical, I have come across a great many players who appear to have never seriously considered them. Just because your Great-uncle John played clarinet in his hometown band during weekly concerts in the park in the early days of the century, you don’t have to bring out his old metal Albert-system clarinet from the attic, dust it off, and try to learn to play it. That’s not only a poor reason for studying clarinet but also a poor clarinet to try to use. Another poor reason for studying the clarinet is to enable yourself to enter contests, either in the public schools or elsewhere; if you are already seriously studying clarinet, and if, after some progress, you want to enter a few playing contests, that is fine. But the clarinet should not be taken up as a mere way to gather a collection of contest medals. There is more to music-making than that. Instead, you should love music-making in general, and the clarinet in particular, in order to be properly motivated to study the clarinet. That love is the first requirement.

To fulfill that requirement you should have a great desire to play the clarinet for its own sake, but perhaps even more important than that you should possess an intense desire to create, and to become expressive, within the art of music. You should feel personally confident in the quality of your playing and the development of your art. And it is essential to success that you possess what psychologists would call a good self-concept. The creative impulse must come from within rather than from someone else such as a tyrannical teacher or a domineering relative. Many fine players have developed their skills under the external influence of such teachers and relatives, but if that influence is stronger than the player’s own inner impulse he will eventually come up against a creative barrier due to the simple fact that he lacks the necessary self-motivation. It all comes back to having an excellent self-concept for, without that, the perseverance the developing player needs will become a chore rather than the immensely rewarding experience that it should be.

Another requirement of fine clarinet playing is a good ear. This can be said of fine playing on any instrument, of course, for it is absolutely essential. Some people seem to have the idea that anyone can learn to play an instrument well if they just practice hard enough, but that is not true. A violinist I know once told me a story about an adult beginning student who came to him with the idea that if he, the student, worked hard and diligently practiced for exactly 14,000 hours, he would automatically become a first-rate violinist. The man had computed the 14,000 hours by figuring out how much time a child prodigy would have to practice before reaching adulthood, and he felt that if a child could do that, so could he. What actually happened was that this man had to give up the struggle after a few months because he lacked a good ear. He discovered that there is much more to becoming a first-rate violinist than the number of hours spent practicing.

What we call a good ear cannot, unfortunately, be taught; you must be born with it, just as you must be born with any other aspect of talent. This does not mean, however, that your ear cannot be improved through study. The clarinetist’s knowledge of music and his ability to interpret it are tremendously enhanced by ear training, as that term is used by music theory teachers today. In fact, such study is essential to fine clarinet playing. You can also train your ear through intelligent listening to your own clarinet playing and that of others. You must be able to distinguish an interval, or the distance between two tones, before you play the two tones in question; you must be able to play in/tune with yourself and with others; and you must work toward developing a fine tone quality in the sound that issues forth from your clarinet. All these things are essential to the development of a good ear, and a good ear is essential to the development of these things.

The clarinetist’s next requirement is a good teacher. No blanket statement can adequately describe a good teacher, but I strongly feel that the best clarinet teachers are those who can both play and teach. There are fine players who, unfortunately, are unable to communicate with students. Equally unfortunately, there are articulate people who cannot back up their communication skills with good playing experience. It becomes obvious, then, that you should pick for your clarinet teacher a fine player who has demonstrated the results of good teaching through his former students. This represents the ideal situation, of course, and the ideal cannot always be attained. So, if a choice must be made between these two strengths, I recommend giving preference to the fine player. If such a player’s interest in teaching goes beyond monetary considerations, he will at least try to explain to the student what he is doing to achieve his fine playing, and he will be able to set goals for you. The good communicator who cannot play well, however, is communicating to you from a very limited frame of reference. In clarinet teaching, there is no substitute for the teacher’s knowledge of how first-class clarinet playing actually feels.

Other personal characteristics required of aspiring clarinetists, such as the ability to be endlessly patient with one’s own progress (or with the seeming lack of it), will be dealt with later in the book. But, first, let us consider the clarinetist’s equipment and accessories, since musicians have material needs as well as intangible ones.

EQUIPMENT AND ACCESSORIES

Quality equipment is as essential to good clarinet playing as it is to any other craft, of course; but it may surprise many people to learn that the clarinet itself is probably not the most important item on the equipment list. The mouthpiece is the clarinetist’s most important object. Second in importance is the condition of the clarinet and its mechanism. Next in importance may very well be the reed, and we have already relegated the clarinet itself to fourth place on the list of important pieces of clarinetist’s equipment. The specific reasons for listing the mouthpiece, the condition of the clarinet, the reed, and the clarinet itself in that particular order will become clearer as we discuss each of those items later on. Suffice it to say here that each of those items must be of the highest quality obtainable.

The rest of the necessary equipment and accessories is listed here in no particular order.

A clarinet swab is necessary to clean and dry the bore of the instrument after each playing, and it’s a good idea to use it during long playing sessions which allow condensation to collect inside the instrument. More will be said about this when the care of the clarinet is discussed, but for now please note that allowing excessive moisture to gather in the bore of your clarinet is bad for both the wood in the instrument itself and for the pads covering the tone-holes. A variety of clarinet swabs is available in music stores, but the best one of all is one that you make yourself. Clarinetists know the problems and limitations of most commercially made swabs: They are too short to go through the entire bore of the clarinet so you have to take the whole clarinet apart to swab it out; they have little, rough, hard-to-control metal weights that may, and often do, scratch the surface of the clarinet bore; and finally, many of them fail to absorb moisture well. In order to make a superior swab you need three things: a large piece of fabric, a 40-inch shoe- or bootlace, and a piece of wooden doweling about the same length and diameter as a new, unsharpened pencil. (In fact, a new, unsharpened pencil will work just as well.) All you do is sew 10 or 12 inches of one end of the bootlace onto a corner of your material in such a way that it extends straight from the corner toward the center of the material. In other words, sew it on so that when you use it later as a swab, the string will pull a corner of the material into the clarinet first, rather than the middle of a straight side of it. The material can either be a three-sided or a four-sided piece, and of course, the little plastic endpiece on the shoestring should be cut off. After you have attached the string to the cloth, simply sew the doweling (or the pencil) into the interior of the other end of the shoelace. Once it is inside, stitch across the end of the shoelace to keep the wooden piece from falling out, and stitch across the shoelace at the other end of the wooden piece so that it will not fall down even farther into the shoelace toward the piece of material. Your new swab will be ready to use when you make sure it fits through the bore of the clarinet. Drop the weighted end of the swab into the assembled clarinet (minus the mouthpiece, of course) at the bell end, watching for it to emerge at the barrel-joint end, and then try to pull the material through; if it gets stuck in the clarinet, remove it by taking the clarinet apart around it. Then trim the material to size. When the fit is right, hem the material all around the edges so that it will not fray too readily during use. I have a black swab that my wife made for me from a woman’s head scarf, and it has worked very well for several years.

A reed clipper is indispensable during the processes of reed preparation and adjustment, and its proper use will be discussed in Chapter 11, Reeds. The best reed clippers are made by the Cordier company in France. There are many less expensive ones on the market, and although none of them compares with the Cordiers, a young student learning to work with reeds can do very nicely at first with a less expensive clipper. Eventually, though, a Cordier reed clipper should be purchased. When choosing one, take along to the music store a few old reeds that you won’t be using any more and test the reed clippers to make sure they cut cleanly and evenly.

A few pieces of the finest-grained sandpaper are just as indispensable while working with reeds as the reed clipper is. Be sure to get the finest available, such as 600A or something even finer, or else you will tear far too much wood off your reeds, especially when the paper is new. Again, proper use of the sandpaper will be discussed in Chapter 11, Reeds. Many clarinetists recommend using Dutch rush, or reed rush, for some of the same purposes that I use sandpaper, but I think that a small piece of sandpaper wrapped around the index finger works just as well, and it is much more readily available than Dutch rush.

Next, in order to have something to use the sandpaper on, you will need a piece of plate glass. This can be any size from a few square inches on up. Plate glass is a big help in working with reeds, and for sanding purposes it is unsurpassed. When sanding on it, always use the same spot on the glass, since repeated sanding does mar the surface of the glass. Some clarinetists use Plexiglas or some sort of sheet plastic, but plastic seems to me to wear down too quickly if it is used for sanding. When you buy the piece of glass, request that the glass company buff down the edges so that they will not be sharp. If you are thinking of making your own reeds, see Chapter 11, Reeds, in which I give more specific information on the sizes and thicknesses of glass to buy.

A reed scraping knife is absolutely essential if you are going to make your own reeds (see Chapter 11, Reeds, again). It can be a big help even with commercially made reeds. Any knife, I suppose, could be used if it will take a keen edge on a straight blade. The well-known Exacto knives have the advantage of using disposable blades, eliminating any sharpening process. Many clarinetists use such knives. The serious reed worker, however, should have a fine, straight, beveled-edged knife such as the ones used by bassoonists in making their reeds. The bassoon knives seem handier for making single reeds than do the oboe knives, and there are several music supply mail-order houses that sell both bassoon-reed scraping knives and clarinet-reed scraping knives without bothering to tell the buyer that they are one and the same knife!

A supply of cork grease is needed in order to properly lubricate the cork-covered tenon joints of the clarinet. Without cork grease the corks will dry out, crack, tear, and cause air leaks between the clarinet’s joints.

A soft-bristle brush, such as one of the larger sizes commonly used by schoolchildren for their watercolors, is excellent for keeping dust and dirt out of the mechanism of the clarinet. An occasional brushing under the keys and around posts and rods is a good way to keep up the appearance of your clarinet, and may even help to maintain smooth working order.

A small bottle of key oil, or of sewing machine oil, is useful for occasional application to the key mechanism, at the various points where moving parts meet, again to maintain good working order. A stiff or sluggish mechanism simply makes clarinet technique more difficult than it already is.

Just like a fine piece of furniture, the wooden bore of the clarinet needs to be taken care of, and for this you need some bore oil. There are various kinds of commercially prepared bore oils, but the best one is probably already in your home: It is olive oil, just as good for the wood of your clarinet as it is for dressing your salads. To apply the oil to the bore of the clarinet you need a special oiling swab. This has to be a different swab from the one you use for normal cleaning and drying because, if you use the same one, you will soon have an excessive amount of oil in the bore. Use an old swab that you have put into retirement, or make a special swab as described on page 4, but do not use a commercially made oil swab that contains a twisted metal handle! That metal handle can do more harm to your clarinet bore during one use than you might ever do by failing to oil the bore at all. Whatever you use to apply bore oil should be just as soft and smooth as your regular swab is. The proper way to oil a clarinet bore will be discussed in Chapter 3, The Clarinet Itself and Barrel Joints.

In order to replace any screws that may be working their way out of your key mechanism, you should have a special repairman’s screwdriver. Or you could use a jeweler’s screwdriver, or any other small screwdriver that has a small blade. The screwdriver is especially useful if it has a small but very long blade. It is possible to purchase screwdrivers with a selection of interchangeable blades.

On the list of required materials needed by a clarinetist there must be, of all things, the humble pencil. A pencil may seem insignificant but the experienced player knows that when he needs to write something down and he finds himself without a pencil handy, he feels silly. A pencil is very helpful during individual practice sessions, and many ensemble conductors become enraged at players who have nothing to write with during rehearsals. Keep a pencil right beside your other clarinet supplies.

Unless you have access to institution-owned equipment, you must have your own music stand. Many parents of young students fail to see why their little clarinetists can’t simply prop up the music on the piano (this puts the music up much too high and sometimes causes actual damage when the clarinet and piano keyboard collide) or, worse, they fail to see why the music can’t be propped up inside the clarinet case lying open on the bed. Any clarinetist could tell those parents that playing problems can easily develop when a young student is attempting to read his music at an undesirable angle, since it forces him to hold his clarinet at an equally undesirable angle. Get a music stand!

Not as essential as the other items I have mentioned, but helpful enough to be included here, is the clarinet stand. Usually made of wood or metal, with one or more pegs mounted on it, it is specifically designed for holding clarinets in a vertical position. Players in symphony orchestras use the two-peg variety on the floor in front of them in order to facilitate changing rapidly from the B-flat to the A clarinet and back again, but even in the home it is better to stand the clarinet up on a peg during a short interruption than to lay the clarinet down on its keys.

Finally, clarinetists should have a place to store their clarinets and equipment and to practice without being disturbed and without disturbing others. I have often encountered the sad plight of a young student who has several brothers and sisters, some of them sharing the same room he uses for playing and sleeping. It is no wonder at all that such a student is discouraged from practicing. Even if you are an older, more experienced clarinetist, it is essential that you have a special place to keep your things and to practice your clarinet. It should be a place that is used for nothing else, so that if you are, for instance, working on reeds, you can leave your work where it sits and return to it later, knowing that nothing will come along in the meantime to disturb it. A special table or desk, containing several drawers, is excellent for the purpose, and, better yet, if you have such a luxury available, is a separate room to put it in.

The commercial music supply industry has an endless catalog of clarinet accessories, widely advertised and readily available, but I believe that the items I have listed here are the only ones that are absolutely necessary. To be sure there are products, not mentioned here, that are simply fun to own and that do serve a useful purpose. Perhaps you will enjoy expressing your individuality by owning and using something that nobody else within your circle of acquaintance has. If you get the items I have described here, however, be assured that you are off to a good start with adequate equipment.

CHAPTER

2

Mouthpieces and Ligatures

THE MOUTHPIECE

As already noted, the most important part of the clarinet is its mouthpiece. Thus, we will begin our discussion of the clarinet with a description of mouthpieces.

Unfortunately, no two mouthpieces are alike. If we could be sure of a method or system whereby we could duplicate certain existing mouthpieces noted for their high quality, much of our trouble concerning mouthpieces would disappear. There is no such system, however, and, due to the countless factors affecting mouthpiece quality, there probably never will be such a system. In mouthpiece selection, then, we must do the best we can with available knowledge and with intelligent selection. Although mass-produced mouthpieces, manufactured on an assembly line, are made of the same materials and to the same specifications, they are never entirely uniform. Even the mouthpieces made to the same specifications by a master craftsman who specializes in refacing mouthpieces are never exact duplicates of one another, although such a craftsman will be able to come very close to his own ideal.

Let me describe the mouthpiece more fully: The parts of the mouthpiece are the facing, the window, the side-rails and the tip-rail, and the chamber. The facing is the flat part of the mouthpiece on which the reed is placed, and it extends from the bottom of the mouthpiece up towards the tip. Some musicians have referred to this flat part as the table or the lay; still others have referred to the lower, straight section of it as the table and to the upper part that gradually curves away from the reed as the facing, but I prefer to call the entire flat reed-placement area the facing. The window is the approximately rectangular-shaped opening in the mouthpiece that leads down into the bore; the side-rails and the tip-rail are the edges of the facing that surround the window at the sides and at the tip; and the chamber is the hollowed-out area inside the mouthpiece.

Clarinet mouthpieces have been made from many different materials such as wood, metal, crystal, plastic, or hard rubber. Wood, metal, and plastic are not recommended since each possesses at least one fatal flaw such as a lack of durability or poor tone quality. Many fine clarinetists advocate crystal, or glass mouthpieces. I have heard excellent tone quality produced with crystal. On the whole, however, I prefer mouthpieces that have been bored from hard rod rubber, and I recommend that you try to select a mouthpiece made from that material. Hard rubber seems to me to possess more advantages and fewer drawbacks than the other materials do, and apparently most good mouthpiece manufacturers, as well as most good clarinetists, agree on this.

MOUTHPIECE SELECTION

To select a good mouthpiece you must first be sure of what it is you want. That is another deceptively simple statement; you may think you know what you want, but do you? If you have not played clarinet for very long, it may be best for your teacher to select a mouthpiece for you. You should do your own choosing only after you are sure of exactly what you want.

The trying-out of new mouthpieces must always be done on a clarinet that you are used to; otherwise you will have no true basis for comparison. This is also why it is not a good idea to get a new clarinet and a new mouthpiece at the same time; you should get accustomed to one before trying the other.

There are four criteria upon which to judge a mouthpiece: (1) intonation, or its ability to play in tune with itself and with other instruments; (2) tone quality; (3) response, or its willingness to begin a sound exactly when you want it to, or its ability to speak; and (4) freedom, or its ease of blowing. These four criteria are all very important and I have not listed them in any particular order. You must be very careful not to allow the last two, response and freedom, to take precedence over the first two, intonation and tone quality. It is easy to be fooled by a very responsive, free-blowing mouthpiece, and you might discover later that you are not pleased with its tuning or with its sound. Insist upon response and freedom, to be sure, but be certain that you like the mouthpiece’s tuning and tone quality first.

To test a mouthpiece for intonation, play octaves, perhaps in long tones, and really listen to them. Are the octaves in tune, or do they sound rather narrow or rather wide? Play slow-moving scales, listening to each interval. It is a good idea to play these octaves and scales at very different volume levels, too, to make sure that the loudness or softness of your playing does not unduly affect the pitch. Finally, enlist the help of another clarinetist and play slow-moving scales with him in octaves and in unison to check the pitch. The final test for intonation is playing duets to see whether you have any unusual intonation problems in a playing situation. Many experienced players would argue that I have forgotten to mention an obvious test for intonation: the use of an electronic tuning machine. It may be a good idea to check your pitch with a machine, but I am somewhat skeptical of that approach for several reasons. The machine may be very accurately calibrated, but it will never make any music of its own! The world’s finest players, using their own excellent clarinets, would never be able to match pitches to the electronic satisfaction of the machine, and I submit that they don’t have to do so. Among fine players in any ensemble there has to be a certain amount of give-and-take that constantly shifts from one tone to the next. An experienced player knows this and adjusts accordingly, but it is all too easy for a younger player to be mistaken about whether his mouthpiece plays in tune if he takes the machine too seriously. Use the machine to look for glaring discrepancies, if you must (but even there I would claim that if the discrepancies are all that glaring they will show up in normal playing), but take the machine, otherwise, with a grain of salt.

To test a new mouthpiece for tone quality, simply discover whether it is easy to achieve the full range of tone colors that you desire from that mouthpiece. If you like the basic tone quality, something that no one can adequately describe in words and something that is a matter of personal taste anyway, try playing different musical styles at different volume levels, attempting at the same time to be very expressive and mindful of the phrasing, and decide whether you are satisfied with the mouthpiece from those standpoints. If you need a little more guidance on that, I have attempted a description of ultimate tone quality near the end of Chapter 5, The Embouchure.

To test a new mouthpiece for its response, play long tones in the low and the high ranges of the instrument at both soft and loud volume levels. Then play a familiar piece of music that contains many different types of articulations in varying patterns. Through it all, observe whether the mouthpiece is responding to your wishes.

To test the new mouthpiece for the fourth criterion, freedom, see whether it feels stuffy or sluggish during your long tones as well as during quicker-moving phrases of regular music. If you require a thinner reed than you are used to, I would recommend rejecting that mouthpiece. The resistance that is necessary in good clarinet playing should be built into the reed, and not into the clarinet or the mouthpiece. This opens up a whole new area for discussion, and to pursue it further see Chapter 11, Reeds. Meanwhile, though, let’s just say that your new mouthpiece should maintain free-blowing qualities while using the same strength of reed that you are already used to, and that, in any case, it should not force you to go to a softer reed. If you have been used to playing on relatively soft reeds and the new mouthpiece requires firmer ones, that may well be permissible and desirable, but don’t go the other way in reed strength.

MOUTHPIECE FACINGS

The foregoing description of an approach to mouthpiece selection should be adequate for the purpose; using the four criteria mentioned is of utmost importance. However, more should be said about mouthpiece facings, since they have such an effect upon the playing qualities of both the mouthpiece and the reed. You will find it useful and informative, also, during your gathering up of several trial mouthpieces, to understand how mouthpiece makers and refacers measure and record the differences between various facings.

In the earlier days of the twentieth century there was no standardized method of scientifically comparing different mouthpiece facings, but the refacer Erick Brand of Elkhart, Indiana, came up with a system in the 1920s or 1930s. This method has become well known and works very well. Before describing it, however, one point must be made very clear: The facing is only one of a great many factors affecting the playing behavior of any particular mouthpiece. Some of the other important factors include the mouthpiece chamber’s size and shape, the material used in manufacturing the mouthpiece, the reed, the clarinet’s barrel joint, the rest of the clarinet, and the player’s embouchure and breath support. The facing does have a tremendous effect on reed behavior, however, and also on how easily your clarinet will respond to your playing activities. With the facing’s importance in its proper perspective, then, and with our eyes wide open, we will proceed with a discussion of the Erick Brand method of facing measurement.

This method measures two different aspects of a mouthpiece facing: (1) the length of the facing’s curve (that is, the distance between the point where it begins curving away from the reed, and the tip of the mouthpiece) and (2) the tip-opening of the mouthpiece (that is, the distance between the tip of the mouthpiece and the tip of the reed). For brevity’s sake, these two measurements are referred to as the facing’s length and tip-opening, respectively. The length is expressed by a numeral representing the number of half-millimeters of curve length, and the tip-opening is expressed by a numeral that is actually representative of percentage of a millimeter, or which could be thought of as hundredths of millimeters.

We will discuss the method of measuring the curve, or the length, first. Erick Brand has manufactured a transparent glass gauge that is used in conjunction with metal feeler gauges of the same type as that used by auto mechanics in their work with spark plugs and distributor points. The glass gauge is placed on the mouthpiece facing just as